Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“ONCE UPON A TIME – THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK”

Once Upon a Time, one of the stories in the Heroes and Monsters collection, is a deliciously metafictional yarn that blends the whimsical with the sinister. The Doctor and Donna stumble across a short story that changes every time it’s read, prompting them to investigate the mysterious author behind the impossible text. What they find is less Enid Blyton and more Black Mirror.

The core concept here is a creepy one: a parasitic creature that feeds on imagination by trapping people in an eternal loop of storytelling, forcing them to produce a never-ending stream of ideas. It’s a fate worse than writer’s block—it’s writer’s slavery. The more creative you are, the tastier you become. A nightmare for anyone who's ever dabbled in fiction.

BANTER, BRAINPOWER, AND A BIT OF META-HORROR

What makes the story sing is the spot-on dynamic between the Tenth Doctor and Donna. Their characteristic back-and-forth banter is pitch-perfect, with Donna’s grounded scepticism clashing entertainingly with the Doctor’s bubbling enthusiasm. It's always a joy when a story captures their rhythm so well—equal parts humour, snark, and genuine camaraderie.

The Doctor gets a real moment to shine here, using his rapid-fire thinking and manic energy not just to defeat the creature but to outpace it. The solution—to write out an absurd volume of content, print the story, and delete the digital version, thus trapping the imagination parasite in the printed page—is deceptively simple and fantastically Doctor Who. It feels like the sort of resolution Douglas Adams would’ve been proud of: wildly inventive but grounded in internal logic.

AN IMAGINATIVE IDEA, WELL EXECUTED

The story leans into its metafictional premise in the best way. The idea of a story that rewrites itself is a classic trope, but here it’s used to highlight the terrifying power of imagination—and the cost of exploitation. The monster is a fun, creepy idea, especially for those who’ve wrestled with the act of creation. And the fact that the Doctor ultimately outwrites the creature—burying it beneath a mountain of manic prose—is both funny and oddly satisfying.

This isn’t a plot with galactic stakes, but its scale is perfect for a short story, and the horror of being trapped inside an endlessly morphing narrative is used to strong effect.

📝THE BOTTOM LINE: 8/10

ONCE UPON A TIME is a sharp, imaginative short story that delivers a slice of metafictional horror with a very Doctor Who twist. The Doctor and Donna’s chemistry is captured perfectly, and the idea of a creature feeding off imagination is genuinely unsettling. The resolution is clever, effective, and oddly charming. With witty dialogue, a creepy monster, and a great showcase for the Doctor’s racing mind, this is a standout story that proves sometimes the pen (or keyboard) really is mightier than the sword.

There's something that I really like about stories about stories, and this does just scratch that itch for me. Sure the idea of a 'medium monster' has been done before, but as with a lot of these shorts there's a certain charm to the way it's done here.

The inciting incident is a great way to bring us in, especially being about the medium it's a part of, and the fact Donna briefly gets sucked into the monster's power as well gives us a chance to see what impact the creature can have on others from a first person view (if the descriptions of rotten fruits weren't enough).

And again, the ending, beating the creature with a happily ever after, and 10 reminiscing on how that used to be how things end is really nice and does bring you into the emotion.